“She did,” Alex said.

“So you show them Odalys’s picture? Ask ’em for a description of anybody that visited in the last week or so? Maybe they met Odalys, knew why she was there. And hey, Patrice Caudwell was older, became an adult in the fifties. She had money. But I bet you she didn’t know enough about computers to do the transfers herself. Bet she had a money manager. Did you talk to them?”

Alex slunk down into her seat. “No.”

“There’s something to be said for legwork,” Wright said. “Sometimes you gotta walk the beat.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “But sometimes your boss won’t let you.”

Wright turned a surprised glance at Sylvie, and she said, “Don’t give me that look. We’re dealing with black magic and murder. Alex stays behind the screen. Demalion can tell you what happens when she doesn’t.”

“You just don’t want to pay me danger fees,” Alex muttered. “The snake thing was once, Sylvie. Once.”

“Once is enough,” she said. “A god intervened to save your life. How often do you think that happens? Still, Wright’s got a point, and most of his questions can be asked and answered on the phone line. Try to track anything down.”

Alex nodded. “I did look into other deaths. I think I found yours.” She tabbed over on the screen, turned it about so Sylvie could have a better look. An obituary in the Herald, a smiling craggy face under a cloud of white hair. Sylvie pictured those thin lips squared and open around a gaping black hole of a mouth, her eyes glittering with malevolence, her bones made stark beneath ghostly skin. “That your crazy lady ghost?”

“Oh yeah,” Sylvie said.

“Who was she?” Wright asked.

“A helping hand,” Alex said. “A pillar of society. Margaret Strange, charity woman, and in her last year, senior volunteer at Baptist Hospital. She quit after one of her elderly charges died on her shift.”

“Alone with him when it happened?” Sylvie said. It wasn’t really a question. She recalled the smothering sensation of tightly stretched cotton pressed against her flesh, cold and clammy with ghostly intent.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Apparently, it really upset her.” She shot a glance at Wright that was half challenge, half apology. “I did talk to the hospital staff. I got to know some of them pretty well while I was in. Jenny, the volunteer coordinator, said she quit right after. She wasn’t really surprised. They lose a lot of volunteers after a death. Strange died not that long after in her own home. Suicide, I think.”

“By hanging?” Sylvie asked.

Alex cocked her head. “Don’t know. I was mostly reading between the lines. Does it make a difference? We know Caudwell died naturally.”

“Don’t know,” Sylvie repeated it back to her. “What about money. Strange have any?”

“She should have,” Alex said, “but she didn’t have any. It was embezzled, and recently.”

“So no payments to Odalys . . .” Wright stood, paced a tight circle.

“Hard to tell,” Alex said. “If some money went missing before the rest, I can’t tell. It’s under active investigation and my . . . sources can only do so much. But I did figure out the most likely place for Zoe to have gotten her filthy lucre.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Alex looked a little too determinedly calm about it.

“Moneylender down near the dog track. His place was turned over and his safe emptied. No sign of who or how it was done. Pretty smart of her, really.”

Wright said, “Yeah, except now she’s got a heavy looking for his money.”

“No,” Alex said, then bit her lip. Oh, this was the part she didn’t want Sylvie to hear, the part she’d been hiding underneath her pragmatism.

“He’s dead?” Sylvie asked. “Died in his office, didn’t he. Unknown causes?”

Alex nodded. “She probably doesn’t even know. Didn’t mean to—”

“So manslaughter instead of murder?” Sylvie shook her head. “I guess that’s better. But not by much.” She slipped away from Alex’s outstretched hand, leaned up against the desk, pushing the fine traceries of sand across the floor with her sneaker toe, focusing on that small detail. She watched the grains move, listened to Wright interrogating Alex about homicides in hospitals and why they were harder to commit than she might have thought, listened to Alex shut him up by simply pointing out that Margaret Strange’s left hand had become a Hand of Glory, thus a murderer. If not the man at the hospital, then who?

“Good question,” Sylvie said. “We need to remember, these women aren’t victims. In their last years, they each made a choice to kill someone. Why?”

“What about the Hands we collected today?” Wright said. “They murderers also?”

“Alex—” Sylvie said.

“I can pull up all recent deaths, comb through their pasts for hints of murder, but hell, this is Miami.”

“Rich people,” Sylvie said. “The two Hands we’ve identified are both rich, or should have been, and in the twilight of their lives. I’d start there.”

“And you’ll be—”

“Taking a look-see at Odalys’s condo, though I don’t expect it to pan out. Condos aren’t really necromancy-friendly. The neighbors tend to complain about the smell. Defective or not, these Hands have been cured.”

Wright’s lips curled up in distaste and understanding. “Once,” he said, “we rousted a guy who’d killed his girlfriend but couldn’t figure out where to stash the body. He bled her out in his bathtub and hung her up to dry. It was a cold winter, but . . . yeah, you can’t hide that smell.”

Alex made the “ew” face, so vivid on a girl with a tongue stud and bright lipstick. “Speaking of . . . take those Hands with you. The bell will drive me crazy otherwise.”

SYLVIE HUNG BACK WHEN THEY REACHED THE CONDO; WRIGHT AND Demalion had spent the ride double-teaming her, seamlessly working together, arguing about police procedure, about stealth, about catching flies with honey, until her head spun listening to the cadences of their voices flip back and forth, watching Wright’s wiry body lock up as if its nerves couldn’t keep up with the conflicting impulses the two minds sent it. Wright’s hand, resting on his thigh, twitched and trembled as if it were attached to a live wire.

All of that effort just for a discussion about which of them should approach the doorman.

“Stop talking about it and do it,” Sylvie snapped, reaching across and jerking the passenger’s-side door open. She brushed against him, recoiled at the fever heat roiling off his skin. He looked over at her, face immobilized by that same strange nervous-system lockdown; she wasn’t sure which of them was listening, if either. “Go, but first decide who’s doing the talking, or the doorman’s likely to call the cops. Maybe an ambulance. And Christ, give it a rest. I mean, I’m glad you’re making nice and all, glad you found some way to communicate, but Wright’s body looks about one step from a heart attack; and then where would you be?”

Wright’s body jerked, one of them wresting command enough to get out from under the spate of her aggravation. She was betting on Demalion; he’d been on the rough side of her tongue more often than he appreciated. She leaned out to shout something after him, but her phone rang, and she snatched it up without even looking at the number.

“Shadows, what the hell is going on?”

“Lio? Everything go all right with the evidence recovery?” Sylvie said.

“Forget that,” he gritted out. “Isabella Martinez just walked out of the hospital morgue. What’s going on!”

“She’s not dead?” Sylvie said. “But she was dead. You said so.”

“The goddamned doctors said so, too, but what do they know, because Bella went home this afternoon, walking on her own two feet.”

Sylvie’s brain blanked utterly. Suarez continued to harangue her, but she was made of sterner stuff than Demalion or just more wrapped up in her thoughts. Bella had been dead.